Dangerous Minds in Tucson: the Banning of Mexican American Studies and Critical Thinking in Arizona

Journal of Educational Controversy Volume 8 Number 1 Who Defines the Public in Public Article 9 Education? 2014 Dangerous Minds In Tucson: The Banning of Mexican American Studies and Critical Thinking In Arizona Curtis Acosta Acosta Latino Learning Partnership Follow this and additional works at: https://cedar.wwu.edu/jec Part of the Education Commons Recommended Citation Acosta, Curtis (2014) "Dangerous Minds In Tucson: The Banning of Mexican American Studies and Critical Thinking In Arizona," Journal of Educational Controversy: Vol. 8 : No. 1 , Article 9. Available at: https://cedar.wwu.edu/jec/vol8/iss1/9 This Special Section is brought to you for free and open access by the Peer-reviewed Journals at Western CEDAR. It has been accepted for inclusion in Journal of Educational Controversy by an authorized editor of Western CEDAR. For more information, please contact [email protected]. Acosta: Dangerous Minds In Tucson: The Banning of Mexican American Studie Dangerous Minds In Tucson: The Banning of Mexican American Studies and Critical Thinking In Arizona Curtis Acosta Acosta Latino Learning Partnership It has been over a year since the president of the school board in the Tucson Unified School District wrapped his gavel on the sound block signifying the end of the Mexican American Studies Department in Tucson. This moment not only stood as a temporary victory for the politics of fear and anti-Latin@ legislation and sentiments in Arizona, but also initiated a literal state takeover of our academic spaces. Subsequently, it ushered in a period of censorship that still chills our schools and teachers to this very day. The fact that this was a program that had proven academic success spanning seven cohorts of Chican@/Latin@ students, performances that TUSD had never before attained with their Chican@/Latin@ population, made the actions of the state officials and TUSD school board even more tragic (Cabrera, Milem, & Marx, 2012; Cambium Learning, 2011; Gomez & Jimenez-Silva, 2012; Sleeter, 2011). In the wake of these traumatic events upon our students and community, a group of youth and I refused to be victimized and established the Chican@ Literature, Art, and Social Studies (CLASS) program which met on Sundays at a local youth center to keep Mexican American Studies (MAS) alive in Tucson. Eventually, word of our program reached Prescott College in Prescott, Arizona, which led to our students receiving free college credit for their dedication and resiliency as scholars. There is a lesson to be learned from such action in terms of refusing to submit to injustice and having the will to carry on through difficult times. These are lessons that I have learned from my students throughout the nearly eight-year attack on our teachers, programs, and community. However, the past year of collaborating with the youth in CLASS allowed me insight and perspective toward the issues that we faced in Tucson that have connection to a much larger and distressing reality of public education in the United States. In the following piece, it is my aim to engage in an analysis of whether public schools still maintain the tenet and charge of creating a critical democracy through the voices and experiences in Tucson: What type of critical thinking is dangerous enough to require surveillance by Arizona state officials, legislation and ultimately state takeover, erasure and destruction of effective educational spaces? What type of thinking is being encouraged through state and local leadership? What are the implications of not challenging status quo, educational practices or the discourse of educational reformers? How do we challenge and resist educational hegemony? 1 Published by Western CEDAR, 2012 1 Journal of Educational Controversy, Vol. 8, No. 1 [2012], Art. 9 Contemporary Education Policy Toward Critical Thinking In the summer of 2013, at a public forum to become the new superintendent in TUSD, Dr. Helidoro Torres Sanchez was asked about his opinion regarding the dismantling of our Mexican American Studies program and he said, “I don’t believe that our job in education is to indoctrinate. I believe that our job in education is to inform” (Huffington Post, 2013). This response was hauntingly familiar to the type of rhetoric that Tea Party backed politicians in Arizona used to demonize our classes in an effort to discredit the powerful quantitative and qualitative evidence that supported our program’s unique effectiveness in academic and personal empowerment for our students. It was a claim that was often used as our students democratically participated in the public debate to protect our classes through civic engagement such as attendance at school board meetings, public forums and debates, as well as their right to protest through non-violent civil disobedience. Later Dr. Sanchez added the following: So, am I saying that Mexican American Studies should go away forever? No, I’m not saying that. What I’m saying is that we need to understand, and I’ll go back to this, whose dignity was violated to the point that there was legislation passed at the state level to target one class? Whose dignity was violated? (Tucson Sentinel, 2013) This is an excellent question. Although Dr. Sanchez also spoke frankly about not knowing enough of the specific details surrounding the actual MAS classes we taught, his words seem to convey an opinion of sorts. After all, the dignity that he seemed most concerned with from the previous statement is not of the students, teachers, or Mexican American community of Tucson, but for those who were championed by the legislators and politicos of Arizona to eliminate our program. In that same response, Dr. Sanchez purported his belief in critical thought and the ideas that students should receive information and not be politicized, which is an odd thing to say if you are about to enter the educational fray in Tucson, Arizona. Unfortunately for the youth, parents, and educators of our state, politicians do not share the same perspective as TUSD’s new superintendent. In Arizona, education has become intensely political. In both the local and national context, contemporary education policy and regulation have jumped the shark, to use the parlance of our times – contradictions and absurdities abound. In my high school government class as a youth, I remember being introduced to the core tenets of the Republican and Democratic parties and that the former believed in less government oversight, while the latter embraced the concept of government intervention for the good of society. This is not the case in terms of the United States education policy in the 21st century, where all parties involved are neck- deep in the regulation and oversight of public schools. In our case in Tucson, it was Republican officials from Phoenix who usurped the local control and power of the governing board in TUSD, a political act that would have surely made my high school government teacher’s head spin. After all, Arizona State 2 https://cedar.wwu.edu/jec/vol8/iss1/9 2 Acosta: Dangerous Minds In Tucson: The Banning of Mexican American Studie Superintendent of Public Instruction John Huppenthal, one of the key political figures that drove the banning of Mexican American Studies in Tucson, is a fervent supporter of vouchers and parent choice. I remember attending a debate during his campaign to become state superintendent and being struck by the irony of his passion toward parental choice, and yet being willfully unaware of the parents in the auditorium who were advocating for the continuation of MAS. Similarly, Huppenthal used conflicting messages in his public statements in the wake of finding MAS in violation of Arizona Revised Statute 112-15 (Arizona House Bill 2281, 2010). In his press conference where he unveiled the violations on June 16, 2011, he said the following: "This decision is not about politics; it is about education. I have a legal responsibility to uphold the law and a professional imperative to ensure every student has access to an excellent education" (Huichochea, 2011). Yet, in a subsequent interview with Western Free Press (WFP; 2012), Huppenthal responded to the actions to eliminate MAS in Tucson in a far different manner: We are not in the entertainment business. We are in the winning values business…This is the eternal battle of all time. The forces of collectivism against the forces of individual liberty and we’re a beautiful country because we have balanced those things. Now, right now in our country we’re way out of balance. The forces of collectivism are suffocating us – it’s a tidal wave that is threatening our individual liberties. And so, we, at the national level need to rebalance this and we need to make sure that what is going on in our schools rebalance this. From these excerpts, it becomes apparent that contradictions abound with state leadership in Arizona in terms of education legislation and policy. Huppenthal’s vision of education is not only tied to political ideology, but to the opaque concept of “winning values,” which he does not clearly define or discuss. It is also apparent from the interview, and his actions in office, that the values he is referring to are not those shared by the parents, teachers, students, and community that supported MAS. In all likelihood, these voices represent the forces of collectivism that, in his words, are suffocating this country. Although Huppenthal believes schools should be a place for readjustment of these values, he does not address the overt political nature of such a claim, and, in fact, normalizes his own ideology as status quo public school and the standard for which school activities should be measured. Huppenthal’s rhetoric illustrates a strong correlation to the national education reform movements that have eroded local control of communities over their schools since A Nation at Risk was released in 1983.

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